Greenpeace Demonstrates at Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store in NY

More than sixty Greenpeace activists demonstrated at Appleis Glass
Cube on Fifth Avenue in New York Thursday night. This was reported in an article at Yahoo News which said that
the activists shone green lights on the entrance to the store in
order to emphasize the Greenpeace stand on Appleis handling of
e-waste.

The story quoted Rick Hind, Legistaltive Director of Greenpeace
USAis Toxics campaign. "We are not only shining the light on the
issue, but also on Apple?s unwillingness to be an industry leader
on environmental progress."

Apple has been a target of Greenpeace USA ever since their
December 6th report on the progress of 15 major electronics
manufacturers in dealing with the hazardous waste reduction
process.

A communication from Greenpeace shows that considerable weight in
the evaluation of Apple is placed on Appleis public statements and
what they have
promised to do in the future -- based on demands from
Greenpeace. However, Greenpeace has also disassembled five specific laptops
from various manufacturers and analyzed them in terms of toxic substances.
In the report summary, one specific substance was pointed
to, TBBPA, a flame retardant, that Apple uses more of than
the other notebooks examined. The synopsis also mentions
that Apple is looking for alternatives. In other areas,
such as heavy metals, Apple was on par with the other brands
and better than Hewlett-Packard -- for those models only.

There are extreme complexities in rating any company on a
quantitative basis. The Greenpeace notebook
report itself concludes: "The results from this study are applicable to the specific model
tested for each brand, and do not reflect the use of certain
chemicals in the brand as a whole. These issues highlight the
great difficulties in verifying that any individual product, or brand
as a whole, is entirely free of a specific chemical."

In addition, how much weight a company gives to public statements
and promises versus a complete examination of the entire product line,
which is nearly impossible, confirms the difficulty of this process.

Another organization, the Sierra Club, has rated Apple highly for
excellence in its environmental efforts. In April 2006, Apple
was named a "Forward Green Leader," one of the top ten
environmentally progressive companies recognized by the Sierra
Club and its investment advisor, Forward Management.